‘Why care’ was the title of a symposium organised by ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (July 2018) and Lisa Baraitser, author of Enduring time (published November 2017), was one of the academics who presented her thinking. Lisa Baraitser is professor of Psychosocial Theory in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London

The symposium’s programme states: “Taking up the themes of Lisa Baraitser’s recent book Enduring Time, this talk will offer some reflections on the relations between time and care. Care is often assumed to be a set of practices that take the form of an affective engagement with others, so that the world can be maintained, sustained, and repaired. Yet care can also be thought about as a political and ethical decision to remain in what Christina Sharpe calls ‘the wake’: the ongoing disastrous time of the persistent effects of slavery. Remaining, for Sharpe, involves inhabiting and rupturing the wake’s elongated temporality. From this perspective, Baraitser will argue that care is bound up with histories of the antithesis of care, or failures of care, that bring on ways of thinking that may also need to be taken care of and involve the temporal practices of staying alongside others and ideas when care has failed; waiting, staying, delaying, enduring, repeating, and returning as the temporal forms that care takes. Some psychoanalytic resources will help to think about the chronic and interminable, and the repetitive and developmental, in order to better understand the intersections between time, care, and not moving on.”

You will find Baraitser’s keynote speech below:

The introduction to this keynote by Birkan Taş on July 5th 2018 and the discussion afterwards can be looked at here

The introduction to the second day by Benjamin Lewis Robinson (University of Vienna) and the programme can be found here